Stories and Sketches

Art and story discussion blog. Mostly original character art and story progress updates from original writing and fanfic, or RPGs. I'll reblog anything that amuses me or I think is worth sharing, though. 😁 Ao3: MechPilotBard (Pronouns: she/they)

[clownfish-casino]

OKAY I'm curious

where do you write your fics

ellipsus

google docs

directly in the AO3 editor

notes app

physical paper

literally wherever I can (sticky notes, your hand, scrap paper, etc)

something else (tell me in tags or comments !!)

not a fic writer but I wanna press a button too !!!

Remaining time: 2 days 15 hours

would appreciate reblogs for sample size ::]

[marithlizard]

(via bsky)

In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:

Taylor Farms Earthbound Farms Little Salad Bar (Aldi) Marketside (Walmart) Kroger House Brand Target private label greens Costco salads and greens etc Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.

This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.

We need a fully funded and staffed FDA, and regulations with teeth - and that's exactly what we don't have under Trump. To make things worse, the CDC is no longer tracking these outbreaks. We're on our own.

[scistoryteller]

Almost done. . .[record scratch]

I feel like a broken record at this point. But EVERY TIME I think I’m about to finish this Fic chapter, an itch about something not working makes me stop, and fixing it means rewriting chunks of the chapter. 🤬 I swear one day, my updates will not sound like this. Today is not that day.

Today's realization -- Of two directions I could have gone with this, I chose the one I wanted to write more. Then I realized today that I NEED To go with the other one, because otherwise parts of the finale chapters aren't going to work.

*Thud*

[im-fostering-it292]

REblog if you are Asexual, support Asexuals, or spend most of your time actually thinking about Superheroes.

[ragingbullmode]

MAYBE WE’LL MEET AT A BAR 🗣️‼️

[scistoryteller]

This is a really good mashup!

[leebrontide]

Hi everyone!

I'm asking for a (free) favor from y'all.

I'm trying to get more people to sign up for my free monthly author newsletter, and I'd love for you to help me find people who might enjoy it.

Every month, I write an essay about a subject. I'm not just collecting contacts to send ads to!

Sometimes it's about writing process

A Unique Character Development Technique 

The Golden Girls, D&D, and The Newest Way I’m Refusing to Make Writing Solitary 

The Bananabook Method

Lies I Tell Myself, Security Blankets and Backstitch Drafting

On Listening When You Want to Throw Things and Break Stuff

And other times it's a deep dive into a research topic for my books

Why I’m Researching a 19th Century Cult This Month

Spider Goat is Real but is Not Marvel Affiliated

People Just Really Want to Say "Enhance"

That Most Intimate of Thrones

Whose Side is Your House On?

The Care and Feeding of Dream Homes

What Arguing About Captain America Taught Me About Psychotherapy

Nuclear Waste and the Ray Cat Solution

Sometimes it's about mental health, especially through the lenses of fantasy and scifi

Of Flesh and Gundams

What Feeling Are You Most Afraid Of?

Sometimes it's even about legal systems and their interactions with the medical field and expanding medical technologies

Tractors, Cybernetics and the Radical at the Radioshack

Because Everybody Was Calling for YA Scifi About HIPAA, Right? 

Or queer stuff

What Do We Celebrate?

What Stories Are You Made Of?

Or disability

Another Kind of Coziness 

Tinkering With Cyberpunk

Things I Stole from Julian Bashir

What Does Time Feel Like?

Or it could be anything else that I'm willing to think deeper about that month. You can browse the full archive over here.

AND it almost always includes pictures of my very cute cats!

So could you please boost, if you feel your followers might be into that?

The subscription signup is right here.

Help an indie author out?

[coriphallus]

Postmortem of Gender Under the Qun

I. Introduction: A Question of Language

Now that the Qunari have been thoroughly butchered, I wanted to compile my thoughts on gender under the Qun into a more comprehensive 'essay.' This is not primarily an essay about politics, identity, or even gender in the contemporary Western sense. It is an essay about language.

More specifically, it is about what happens when we attempt to understand a foreign culture through English.

Whenever discussions surrounding the Qun arise in online spaces, one phrase inevitably dominates the conversation:

"Under the Qun, your gender is your role."

Most players interpret this quite literally. If someone is a warrior, then they are a man. If someone fulfills another social function that's conventionally feminine, then they are considered a woman. The conclusion appears straightforward, and I suspect it is also the interpretation the writers themselves ultimately settled on.

I intend to dismantle it for my own amusement.

Not because I believe the games secretly intended something else, nor because I think this interpretation is objectively incorrect, but because I approached the Qunlat from a linguistic background fundamentally different from that of English. My first instinct was not to ask, "What does the Qun believe about men and women?" My first instinct was to ask, "What does the Qun mean by gender?"

This analysis is my attempt to explain why.

My native language lacks gendered pronouns. There is no equivalent distinction between "he" and "she." At first glance, this seems like a language where gender is largely irrelevant.

Counterintuitively, that is very much untrue.

The absence of gendered pronouns does not eliminate gender from a language. Instead, it changes where gender lives.

II. Where Language Stores Gender

English speakers constantly encode gender in ordinary conversation without consciously thinking about it.

"I saw her yesterday."

"He said he would arrive tomorrow."

Before these sentences can even be spoken, the speaker must already know which pronoun to choose. Gender becomes one of the first pieces of information retrieved when referring to another person.

This process is so automatic that most native English speakers never notice it.

Turkish works differently.

The sentence Çöpü attığını gördüm simply means:

"I saw them take out the trash."

The sentence contains no information whatsoever regarding whether the person observed was male or female. In fact, depending on context, the subject can even remain ambiguous between 2. and 3. person singular. The information simply is not grammatically required. It is not exposed unless it's required.

It does not mean Turkish speakers are incapable of perceiving gender. It means the language does not force speakers to encode that information every time another person is mentioned whereas English requires it.

Now consider Czech.

Viděl jsem ji vynášet odpadky.

Before we even reach the object of the sentence, the grammar has already revealed something about the speaker themselves. The viděl tells us that the person speaking is male.

Spanish encodes something else.

La vi sacar la basura.

The pronoun identifies the observed person as feminine while la basura independently marks the noun "trash" as grammatically feminine.

None of these languages have more or less genders than the other for both the object and the subject. They simply distribute gender differently.

Some require information about the subject.

Some require information about the speaker.

Some require information about inanimate objects.

Some require almost none at all.

Every language obliges its speakers to express certain kinds of information. English demands tense where Mandarin often relies on context. Japanese frequently encodes social hierarchy where English does not. Czech marks grammatical case in places where English instead relies on word order.

These are not merely quirks of vocabulary, they shape what information speakers must continually keep available while communicating.

Linguists sometimes refer to this as obligatory grammatical information. A language does not necessarily determine what its speakers are capable of thinking, but it certainly determines what they must routinely express. That creates a substantial distinction.

Popular discussions often invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought, as though speakers of different languages possess fundamentally different thought patterns. Most modern linguists reject that for various reasons.

Language does not provably constrict thought. It can, however, influence it by making some distinctions obligatory while allowing others to remain optional.

An English speaker cannot naturally produce the sentence "I saw..." without deciding whether to continue with him, her or them. A Turkish speaker can. That information is stored in the previous context so they fundamentally ask different questions.

III. Gender as Grammar

This brings us to grammatical gender.

One of the most common misconceptions among speakers of languages that lack variety of grammatical genders is the assumption that grammatical gender must somehow reflect biological sex.

It rarely does.

A French speaker does not believe a baguette is female. A German speaker does not think a girl is literally neuter because das mädchen happens to use neuter grammar.

The grammatical category exists independently of biology. Its purpose is structural. Gender in language determines how words behave, which articles accompany them, which adjectives agree with them, which suffixes they receive, how they are declined (or not)...

Gender, in other words, is less about describing reality than organizing it.

A noun belongs to a category because the language requires it to belong somewhere to function.

Native speakers rarely question why a chair is feminine or why a bridge is masculine. The categories simply serve as a part of the language's internal logic. Trying to explain grammatical gender to someone whose native language lacks it often produces the infamous question;

"But why is the chair female?"

The answer, of course, is that it isn't.

The chair is not female.

The word belongs to a grammatical category that English simply lacks (i.e. Masculine inanimate as a grammatical gender carries more information about the state of the object than its 'sex'). The confusion arises because learners instinctively attempt to translate one conceptual framework into another. What if, I began to wonder while playing DAO, the same thing was happening with Qunlat?

What if "man" and "woman" were not 1=1 translations?

What if they were approximations?

What if the game's medium of English language was doing the only thing it could do; mapping an alien system of classification onto the nearest concepts available?

Whether that was the writers' intention is beside the point. I think the possibility itself warrants exploration. Because if the Qun's concept of gender functions less like biological identity and more like grammatical classification, then many conversations throughout the series become open to entirely different interpretations.

This is going to be a long read.

IV. The Qun as a System of Classification

The crucial question is not whether Qunari have gender. They clearly do. The more interesting question is what kind of category gender is within Qunlat.

Most discussions assume that Qunari gender categories are equivalent to human concepts of male and female. The games often encourage this reading, especially in the last installment, but the broader structure of the Qun suggests something else.

The most important thing to understand about the Qun is that it is not primarily a moral philosophy. It is a taxonomy.

Everything under the Qun has a place.

Every person has a function.

Soldiers belong to the Antaam. Spies belong to the Ben-Hassrath. Priests belong to the priesthood. Artisans belong to their craft. The Qun is obsessed not with individual self-expression but with correct classification. A person's value comes from occupying the role for which they are best suited.

Once viewed through this lens, the statement "your gender is your role" begins to sound less like a claim about masculinity and femininity and more like a claim about grammar.

The moral legitimacy of the Qun rests on the belief that disorder arises when things occupy the wrong category. A baker pretending to be a soldier is not merely inefficient; they are violating the proper order of society.

This resembles grammar more than it resembles bioessentialism.

Grammar does not ask what a noun “really is.”

It asks how that noun behaves within the system.

Likewise, the Qun appears less concerned with what a person “is” in some metaphysical sense than with how that person functions within the social order.

Under this framework, gender ceases to be primarily anatomical, it turns into a designation of social behavior and purpose.

That is a subtle but enormous shift.

An English speaker hears “warriors are men” and naturally interprets it to mean “people with dicks are warriors.”

But a Qunari speaker might mean something closer to “the social category associated with warfare is translated into Common as ‘man’ because the people who express warrior-like qualities (aka masculinity) in South are referred to as man.”

The distinction sounds small until one realizes that the second statement does not actually define the category by anatomy at all.

Imagine a language with six grammatical genders:

warrior

priest

artisan

teacher

merchant

caretaker

These categories would not describe anatomy. They would describe function.

A person assigned to the "warrior" category would receive the grammatical markers associated with warriors. A person assigned to the "teacher" category would receive its respective markers. Native speakers would not experience this as strange any more than an Italian speaker experiences the gender of a noun as strange. The category would simply be part of the language.

This is the conceptual leap that I believe many players never make, because English encourages us to treat gender as an identity rooted in gender expression. The Qun may instead be treating gender as a functional classification.

V. Rereading Sten

This is why Sten’s infamous line in Origins has always fascinated me.

"You look like a woman. But you are a soldier. One of those things can't be true."

For many players, the line immediately establishes Sten as sexist. The implication seems obvious: women should not fight. That is certainly a possible reading.

But it is not the only one.

Imagine a speaker whose native language organises people according to functional categories rather than biological sex. Now imagine that speaker trying to communicate through a language that lacks those categories and instead forces every distinction into “man” and “woman.”

Suddenly the sentence becomes less straightforward.

To illustrate the difference, imagine someone saying:

"I am a tailor." "Then why are you commanding an army?"

Under a linguistic (and cultural) reading of the Qun, Sten’s question can be understood similarly.

Notice he starts with "I don't understand. You look like a woman."

This can be a context-seeking question if we go with the assumption that he's not being condescending. He remarks that the Warden looks like someone that should not swing a sword. They are not conforming to the self expression of a sword-swinging role.

"You are a Grey Warden, so it follows that you can't be a woman."

He has not denied the player their role due to their sex, he has denied them their sex due to their role. The role takes precedence. The role is not in dispute. The wording is precise and it is fundamentally very revealing. It doesn't mean a person's sex is an assignment like a profession, it means a person's profession is as predetermined as their sex.

“You identify with category A. Why are you performing the function and expressing the characteristics associated with category B?”

The confusion is categorical. In this sense, it emphasises Qun's strict adherence to roles. Why appear as something you're not? Why express yourself like a priest and fight like a sten? What are you?

The face value interpretation is of course that his assumption that someone can't simultaneously express femininity and also adopt a masculine role is an indicator of how conservative Qun is.

Now contrast this with areal-life experience I've had learning Czech.

In Czech, grammatical gender is not optional, and it cannot easily be avoided without making language itself unnatural or incomplete. Over time, I found myself running into a recurring issue: speakers struggled to consistently apply feminine forms to my name as its phonetic structure was perceived as categorically "masculine-sounding" within their system.

Rather than assigning a gendered grammatical form, people would restructure sentences in ways that bypassed agreement entirely. The result is something comparable to constantly replacing a possessive structure like "Clair’s computer" with the clumsy "computer belonging to Clair" or even "Clair computer" in certain odd cases. It is noticeably strained in everyday use.

At various points, I explicitly stated that I didn't mind being referred to with masculine forms. From my perspective, this was a simple matter of grammatical convenience rather than identity. Yet many speakers still refused to make the shift. This was not a rejection of my gender identity, had I came out as a man I know that these people would have obliged. They thought of it as insulting to me, that I simply lack the lingual framework to understand the distinction. And to a certain degree they are right. As a non-native speaker, I will never experience grammatical gender in the same intuitive, automatic way that native speakers do. I won't feel like I'm being denied femininity simply because of a suffix even knowing it's meaning.

One particularly revealing example was the naming of my cat. Despite her name ending in -o, which in Czech often aligns with neuter grammatical patterns, speakers around me consistently opted to modify the name with the feminine -a ending in order to maintain alignment with the animal’s biological sex. In doing so, they effectively modified the linguistic category of the name itself, prioritizing grammatical and social coherence over morphological expectation.

What this illustrates is not simply a preference for consistency, but the degree to which grammatical gender is treated as a system that must remain internally stable. Even when exceptions are technically permissible, speakers often adjust surrounding language to preserve categorical alignment. This is not because they are consciously thinking about gender at every moment of speech. It is because the language demands that such distinctions remain continuously operational.

Sten, effectively, struggles with the same concept. He wants to hear that -a. He needs it to process the information he receives from what he sees in opposition to what he hears. He prompts the Warden with the same question; If you're a woman, if you wish to be referred to and seen and understood in the social sense as a woman why do you refer to yourself as a man?

This interpretation also explains why his dialogue sounds awkward in English. He speaks as though he is translating concepts that do not map neatly onto the language available to him. The result resembles the discomfort many language learners experience when dealing with grammatical gender.

“Why is a chair feminine?”

The native speaker shrugs because the question itself misunderstands the category.

Likewise, Sten may be encountering a person whose social designation and observable function do not align according to the framework he expects.

Whether the writers intended this nuance is very unlikely. What matters to me personally is that the early lore allows it.

VI. Translation and Approximation

This brings us to one of the most debated terms in the series: notorious aqun-athlok.

We usually treat it as a direct analogy for “transgender.”

That translation is understandable, but I think it may be misleading.

If gender under the Qun is fundamentally a functional category, then aqun-athlok does not necessarily describe a person changing from one biological sex category to another. It describes a person whose social designation has been reassigned.

A useful comparison is professional rather than anatomical.

Imagine a cashier who demonstrates extraordinary aptitude for masonry. The state formally redesignates them as a mason. Their category changes because their function changes. Their pronouns change.

That does not mean they have become physically different. It means the system now recognizes them under a different classification.

Viewed this way, Iron Bull’s explanation to Krem becomes particularly interesting.

Bull understands Southern culture. He knows that the people around him think in terms of men and women as sex-based identities. So he translates the Qun into concepts they can understand, he does this quite frequently.

He tells Krem that his society assigned him one role and that he fought to attain another. That is the closest Common equivalent available.

This is not a lie. It is fundamentally what a translator does for colloquial speech. When a concept has no exact equivalent, translators choose the closest available approximation. English lacks a ready-made set of social-gender categories detached from sex and/or gender expression, so the dialogue maps them onto the familiar binary of "man" and "woman."

We already accept this process everywhere else in fantasy. When a character says "barbarian," we do not immediately assume there is a Greek language for the onomatopoeic term to be coined. When a character says "god," we don't assume their theology matches Christianity. We translate "Yes" as oui or si respectively from the context clues derived from previous information the question provides.

Under this reading, aqun-athlok becomes less “a transgender person in the Western sense” and more “a person recognised under a category different from the one originally assigned to them by the Qun.”

Before discussing disaster that was Veilguard, I want to make one final distinction.

Throughout this analysis I have deliberately avoided claiming that the Qun "has no gender." That statement would be obviously false.

The Qun has gender.

What I question is whether those genders are equivalent to the ones we instinctively imagine.

Translation being an act of approximation, there are words that simply do not survive intact when carried from one language into another. Each translation captures part of the meaning while leaving another part behind.

We accept this instinctively when discussing vocabulary. Oddly, we abandon that generosity when discussing cultures.

When a Qunari says "man," we assume they must mean exactly what an English speaker means by "man."

Why, though?

If the Qun genuinely organizes society according to principles foreign to Southern Thedas, why would we expect one of its central concepts to map perfectly onto Common?

Perhaps it does. It looks like it. The expression of hypermasculinity is certainly the same.

But perhaps "man" is simply the closest available word. This would hardly be unusual.

Sten's earlier confusion also indicates that a person with female features is not exempt from this category of "man", they are exempt from 'womanhood'.

Every translator eventually reaches a point where perfect accuracy becomes impossible. One must choose between preserving the literal words or preserving the underlying concept.

Bull translates the Qun not merely linguistically, but culturally. He knows when to omit details that would only confuse his audience. He knows when to substitute familiar concepts for alien ones. Above all, he understands that communication is not achieved by literal accuracy but by producing the same understanding in another person's mind.

When Bull explains aqun-athlok to Krem, he is not writing a philosophical treatise. He is explaining his culture to someone who lacks the conceptual vocabulary to understand it directly.

That conversation therefore deserves to be read as a translation rather than a dictionary definition.

VII. Why This Reading Matters

At this point, someone might reasonably ask whether any of this matters if the writers themselves probably intended a more conventional interpretation.

It does to me.

Because the value of a fictional culture is not limited to authorial intent. Sometimes worldbuilding accidentally creates implications richer than the story that contains it.

The Qun was designed to feel alien. Ironically, the most alien aspect of it may be one the games never fully explored: the possibility that its concept of gender is not a biological binary at all, but a system of social grammar.

And if that is true, then the later portrayal of Qunari gender becomes much more complicated.

Because a society that classifies people by function would not necessarily experience gender variance in the same way a society that classifies people by anatomy. A society without binary gender also lacks the conceptual absence of binary gender. This may be difficult to imagine because English constantly defines concepts by opposition. Terms such as "stay-at-home spouse" immediately evoke "wife" precisely because the expected word has been omitted, which makes true gender ambiguity an impossibility.

If this interpretation is accepted, then Taash's story in Veilguard raises a serious internal contradiction: a character who is unquestionably a warrior is nevertheless treated by their mother as though biological sex overrides the very system of role-based classification that earlier Qunari lore appeared to establish.

VIII. The Problem of Taash

Taash is not where my interpretation begins. It is where it begins to break.

Under the framework established throughout the earlier games, there is remarkably little ambiguity regarding Taash's social role.

Taash is a warrior. No one disputes this. Not Taash. Not the player. Not their mother. Not the Qun.

Had Taash been raised entirely under the Qun, they would have been a part of Antaam, the dialogue explicitly states this. Their unique talents would've landed them the role of the warrior.

Within the framework the games have outlined, this should already determine the relevant "gender."

If gender corresponds primarily to social designation, then Taash already belongs to the soldier category. By the internal logic established earlier in the series, Taash is already what Common translates as "a man."

This is precisely where Shathann becomes frustrating.

She is portrayed as someone deeply committed to preserving Qunari customs despite living outside the Qun. Much of her relationship with Taash revolves around those expectations.

Yet she consistently refers to Taash according to biological sex.

That strikes me as profoundly strange.

If anyone should instinctively categorize people according to the logic of the Qun, it should be Shathann.

Instead, she appears to do the opposite.

She acknowledges Taash as a warrior.

She never argues they lack the temperament for combat. She never insists they belong in another profession. She wants to encourage them to learn more about their own culture but it is not portrayed as pushing them to scholarly duty due to their physical characteristics. She is even suspicious of the notion of them adopting said Qunari customs.

Yet she continues to categorise them through anatomy.

Ironically, the character presented as enforcing the Qun becomes the one behaving least like the earlier games suggested a Qunari should.

The narrative frames this as a mother attempting to impose biological gender upon her child. If anyone should instinctively think in terms of Qunari categories, it is Shathann. And yet her language appears to prioritize anatomy over function.

Ironically, this places her in the opposite position one might expect. She is simultaneously using categories that the Qun itself would never have privileged in the first place, and is punished by the narrative for it. Portrayed as a close minded boomer that needs to listen to their child.

IX. A Quest for the Binary

This realisation led me to what I consider the greatest failure in Taash's story.

The game presents their travel to Minrathous as part of a search for language capable of expressing who they are. That is debilitating. Not because I disagree with the story being told, but because I believe it accidentally tells another story at the same time. A story about the writers and audience.

The story presents this as liberation from rigid expectations.

But under the linguistic framework I have proposed, something almost paradoxical happens.

Taash does not leave the Qun-based teachings to escape an anatomical gender binary.

They leave it to discover one.

Within the Qun, social designation would already provide the relevant category. "Man" and "woman," understood as identities rooted in biological sex, would not occupy the same conceptual space they do in Southern Thedas.

It is only through sustained contact with the South that Taash encounters a society where anatomy itself becomes the organizing principle.

Only then does the language become available to reject it.

Viewed this way, Taash's story ceases to be one of escaping the Qun's categories. It becomes the story of someone moving between two incompatible systems of classification.

The Qun is one of the most genuinely alien cultures in fantasy precisely because it organises society according to principles that often feel deeply unintuitive to modern readers.

Its understanding of personhood is collectivist rather than individual, its ethics are teleological rather than rights-based, its conception of freedom is almost the inverse of liberal philosophy.

Why should its understanding of gender resemble ours?

Why should it use the same conceptual categories at all?

Reducing Qunari gender to a direct analogue of contemporary Western discourse makes the culture easier to understand. And I'm afraid it is the philosophy the writers understand.

X. Conclusion

Ultimately, I am less interested in arguing that this interpretation is canon than I am in arguing that it is possible.

Language is never a neutral vehicle for ideas.

When I first encountered the Qun, this was simply how I understood it.

Coming from a language without gendered pronouns, I naturally interpreted the Qun's statements about gender through linguistics rather than through biology. Only through time, after discussing the series with English speaking fans, did I realize that most people had reached a very different conclusion.

Eventually, I did too.

I learned to read the Qun the way the games increasingly encouraged me to. I had to perform the very act of translation this long-ass post has been describing. I replaced my own conceptual framework with another.

That experience is precisely why I find this topic immensely gripping.

Language does not merely give us words. It gives us habits of interpretation. The assumptions we bring into fiction are often invisible until we encounter someone whose language encourages different assumptions. Whether my interpretation reflects the writers' intentions is ultimately irrelevant.

I am pretty sure it doesn't.

Still it's very compelling what their worldbuilding accidentally made possible.

In the end, one of the most interesting questions Dragon Age could have asked remains unanswered;

What does gender variance look like in a society that never organized gender around biological sex in the first place?

What does it mean to be genderqueer in a culture whose "genders" are functions rather than identities?

And what happens when such a culture encounters another whose language insists upon distinctions the first never needed to make?

Because if the Qun really was conceived as an alien civilization, then perhaps its greatest unrealised potential lays not in reversing familiar gender roles, but in imagining a society whose very concept of gender belongs to an entirely different universe.

That, to me, would have been far stranger. And far more worthy of the Qun.

[animatejournal]

Discworld: Wyrd Sisters Director: Jean Flynn | Studio: Cosgrove Hall | UK, 1997

[touhouweed]

It genuinely upsets me that there are people who call this animation and voice acting bad, there’s so much heart and soul on display in just this clip alone

[handsometabbyc]

At first glance: ‘lol this is going to be one of those hilariously cheap animations’

30 seconds in: ‘…Oh my god this is fantastic’

[dizzyhslightlyvoided]

“WHO DARES TO INVOKE WXRTHLTL-JWLPKLZ?” “Where were you when the vowels were bein’ handed out, behind the door??”

[what-even-is-thiss]

idk some people just feel threatened by anyone being unapologetically themselves even when they aren’t hurting anyone because it brings up the possibility that the rules are made up and the points don’t matter and that’s an uncomfortable thought

[scistoryteller]

Opening Lines

Rules: Post the first sentence of your latest 10 fanfics, then tag 10 people.

I've only got 3 fics, and ones is a spin-off. I'm also not tagging anyone, because I'm not sure of folks writing status right now. But if you see this and want to steal it, go for it.

Sparks flew and the fabric of the universe trembled as the mecha battled

[ Screen opens to black ] HOST [voiceover]: Welcome! We have a very special episode for you today!

Someone is calling to me.

[scistoryteller]

Whomp, Whomp

Still tired from my trip to ReaderCon, and feeling unfocused and unmotivated to write at the moment, despite having three projects staring at me. I’m feeling especially guilty for not making progress on the Fic tonight, because things are currently months behind where I wanted to be 😩.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[miggylol]

Spin the wheel. That's who's trying to kill you.

Spin the wheel again. That’s who’s trying to protect you.

(If you have zero idea about a name you got, spin until you see someone you recognize.)

Are you safe?

Absolutely not. I'm dead. 100% dead.

I might stay alive, but it'll be a really close thing.

I'll take some hits, for certain, but I should be okay in the end.

A few attacks might get through, but nothing concerning.

The attacker might be able to get in one lucky hit. If that.

I am the opposite of worried. I'm 100% safe.

…Look. I've tried picturing this. But I honestly don't know how to answer.

Voting ended onJul 14

(I've run this poll twice before, expanding it significantly for the second run. With about a year passed since that second run, I thought it was time to add another couple hundred names to the list and have another go.)

[scistoryteller]

I can't stand an incomplete story

GAHHHHH! I just found out that Book 3 of a trilogy I just started reading and really loved (Moonstorm, Yoon Ha Lee) IS NOT BEING COMPLETED 🤬(announcement is on the author’s website)! I can’t stand an unfinished story, so I guess I won’t try to get and read Book 2 after all. 😭😭😭

[wonderstruck]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[quinloki]

It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.

Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.

Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.

The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.

The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.

She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.

She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."

She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.

But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.

To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.

San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.

Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.

Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.

Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.

He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.

It was a mistake that would change American history.

Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.

She saw "her kids."

She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.

Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.

She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.

So, she made a choice.

She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.

Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.

The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.

She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.

"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."

And it did.

Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.

Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."

For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.

She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.

She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."

By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.

In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.

This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.

One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."

They underestimated who they were dealing with.

They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.

It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.

Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.

She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.

Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.

"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."

The quote ran in newspapers across the country.

The court didn't stand a chance.

Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.

The charges were dropped.

Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.

She needed to change the law.

August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.

She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.

But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.

She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.

She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.

In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.

She never got rich.

She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.

She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.

Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.

Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.

Most of them have never heard of Mary.

They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.

They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.

They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.

Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."

She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.

She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.

She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.

Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.

It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.

It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.

Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.

Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.

Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Tags quoted from Previous:

#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma

Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of "A.I. slop" in the comments?

[redsixwing]

I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.

What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.

Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.

The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.

Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.

The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.

Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)

Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.

...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.

I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.

My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!

She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.

The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.

The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.

Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!

We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:

...wow. I should see if my library has that!

The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.

There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.

[spicymochi]

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